Centrino is for servers...
The M chip is for wireless notebooks, and the P4 with Hyper threading is the one you want...

I would recommend the 5150. Its a very nice setup and right now, cheaper than the Toshiba, and free shipping & free 60GB hard drive.

 

dennis, what are you going to be using the laptop for? that should determine what configuration to look for. unless your doing graphics or CAD or some other processor intensive activities, i wouldn't necessarily look for the fastest machine out there. get something decent, PIV or AMD about 2GHz, 384+ RAM, decent size hard drive and display to suit your taste and go from there. Toshiba satalittes, dells and hp's are good machines. Haven't heard much about gateway or anybody else lately. just remember with the wireless, great to be built in but if there is a problem or something new and faster comes out or something goes wrong it's more expensive to fix than replacing just a PCMCIA card.

 

E-mail.
Massive Photo storage & speed to upload to FTE.
Word processor
I like the *finger pad cursor* instead of that stupid little nub in the middle of the keyboard.

Burning CDR files & DVD player.

I would like:

1) Min. 40Gig HD
2) Min. 512mb Ram
3) 15" screen
4) Min. 1.8 Gig processor
5)

 

Hey Dennis, this is what we found in our lab tests:

We've found that the centrino mobile, works at almost twice the speed of regular pentium processors, they do include WiFi, and extended battery life, as well as working with the "855" chipset. They cost significantly higher than pentium M chips, due to the fact the the centrino option is a package, including the 3 things above.

Here is Intel's benchmarks comparing notebook processors.
http://www.intel.com/products/benchm..._centrino_nbbm

The pentium M is very hard to beat. It performs magnificently and has top speeds of 2.6+ Ghz (centrinos top out around 2.0 Ghz, although it might have improved). The battery is very similar although the centrino lasts a bit longer.

Here are white papers supporting Pentium M chips
http://www.atheros.com/pt/Centrino_v...whitepaper.pdf

In a nutshell we concluded after 6 months of testing that the pentium M was the better buy (more bang for the buck). We however run multiple operating systems simultaneously, develop enterprise level applications, write drivers, compile statistical reports, and other processor intensive operations.

For what you plan on doing you probably will not notice the difference. You will have a bat outta hell type laptop though if you decide on Pentium M. BTW Centrino processor's perform fairly similar to Pentium M processor's within the 500 mhz range (i.e. a 1.4 centrino's performance will be similar to up to a 1.9 pentium M, a 1.4 will not perform as well as a 3.0 ghz Pentium M). I hope the information I provided helps.

On side Note: Of the two you posted I would go M30, don't do celeron, new one's are nice, but you can do better for around the same amount of money

 

Well, I had good luck w/ the Compaq I bought for the race team last year. Forget what it was (and no it's up in your neck of the woods Dennis, Ft. Saskatchawan). It had a 15" or 16", 40 gig. hd, 2.2 AMD (forget off hand what they call there mobil processor) etc... all the good stuff. You'll want to find out exactly what you will need, and rule out all the other stuff. I know most of them have it now, but don't get built in wi-fi unless you need it. You on DSL right? Obviously, you can go w/ a built in network card, or you can get one w/o it, and buy an expansion card. Does batt. life matter very much, or will it often be plugged in? If you are wanting massive photo storage, then make sure to find a laptop with the fast hard drives (I think maybe the fastest in laptops are 5400 aren't they?), high buffer (2 mb or better) etc. Also, if you really want fast storage, get a laptop w/ firewire (or atleast 2.0 usb) and purchase an external hard drive (I think these are usually faster than most laptop hard drives, plus, they're widely available, cheap, high buffers, trust me, this might be the route for you).

Now understand this... there is usually a $400 higher price tag on those Intels, and not to say they aren't a great chip, but practically ALL of the desktops I build are AMD's and I never have a problem with them. Also, I know that Our friend up there in Ft. Saskat. has not had a single problem with his Compaq w/ AMD processor. So I would suggest finding an AMD. Also, you can check these sites:

www.pricewatch.com
www.pcclub.com <--- Go here and build you a laptop, see what it will cost you for what you need.

Also, you might want to consider making the couple hundred K trip to the border to see what you can get it for in the States.


Stan

P.S. I hope I have all of my facts strait, I am a desktop guy, so laptops aren't my thing.

 

oh yeah, if you want to spend the money DELL is great, otherwise I would look into toshiba, maybe IBM.

I would stay away from Compaq, and HP, in the last 2 months I've fixed over 12 hp/compaqs all with vendor specific problems, e.g. SP1a conflict with Compaq/HP. Just my personal opinion, not flaming anyone.

 

Yeah sure, whatever. Are my ears getting hot??

Like I said, I do desktops. Laptops, I just know the basics of what to look for.


Oh yeah, make sure you get one with atleast 32mb dedicated video memory (not shared memory with the system). This will greatly increase speed. Like an internal Radeon card or Nvdia. JMO

 

Why would you're ears be hot ... Did you fart?

 

Well, let's just say somebody around here is blowing hot air...

 

Are you refering to Moi? I knew I shouldn't have had that burrito for lunch ...

 

Centrino is not a chip it is a combination of a few things

Mobile proccessor
Wireless capability
Motherboard Chipset

didn't mean to get technical (yes I did)
but I just wanted to clear that up

 

Well,Today in Calgary I made the plunge.

Let's hope I did okay by youse guys

I ended up with a Hp Ominbook 6000

1 Gig processor Pentium III
30 Gig HD
256MB Ram
CDRW/DVD
Small mouse.
Windows 98 SE (matches my home system)

6 month warranty

$850.00 Cdn

 

Hey D. that's not bad at all. Not for that kind of money. The one thing I can see that you may want to upgrade, would be to put some more ram in. It would speed it up alot, a whole lot. I would atleast consider another 256, but it would be better to go with 512 stick, giving you just short of one gig.

It should do you well. How big is the screen?

 

14"

I asked about another stick.they told me another $120.00

I'll watch for it being cheaper.

 

sounds like a good machine and great deal to me. good luck with it. look online for deals on memory.